‘There Are No Accidents’ Viral Campaign
The kids from Southpark once sang ‘Blame Canada’. The people over at WSIB, a Canadian based government agency which deals with work place safety, must have felt the same. Accidents don’t happen in the work place, they are caused due to mistakes made by others.
Their new viral campaign, called Prevent-It, is a series of short ads which show some work place accidents in the most brutal of manners. For our Dutch readers, they are reminiscent of the annual fire works campaign by Sire .
According to their ads accidents do not happen in the work place, they are caused by laziness, poor timing, bad planning and a whole host of other reasons. I don’t think they could have made that any clearer than they have done in these video’s.
Definitely not for the faint hearted!
More from the Prevent-It Campaign:
Ladder
Wearhouse
Rooftop
Funeral
Source: Frank-Ly
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OMG THATS GROSS
No one would argue that workplace safety is not important. However, these gory ads are an elaborate social marketing campaign orchestrated to manipulate the public into talking about accidents, safety and prevention rather than talking about the failure of workers compensation boards to compensate the victims. WCBs in each Canadian province (and in the US) have come under a lot of scrutiny for their avoidance of paying fair compensation to disabled workers. The fact that people are talking about the ads rather than the dysfunctionality of the WCB system shows that this orchestrated social manipulation campaign is working.
WCBs in Canada and the US represent employers (the only ones paying into the fund). Therefore WCBs will do whatever they can to lower fees for corporations. One way is by denying compensation payments to disabled workers. But this would be socially unacceptable unless the public can also be manipulated into believing that the worker is somehow negligent or at fault for causing the accident. In this social marketing campaign, WCBs are subtly adopting the language of the anti-drunk-driver campaign – ” zero tolerance” “negligence”, etc. to manipulate public attitudes towards injured workers. They also use the term “accidents” rather than “injuries” to take the focus away from the person and onto the event. These ads, and other orchestrated ’social engineering’ techniques lay the foundation for WCBs to justify a reduction in injury compensation payments to disabled workers by manipulating public attitudes toward disabled workers.
Those injured workers in the videos would realistically spend the rest of their lives in poverty fighting the WCB for compensation.
The way to reduce injuries is to make companies accountable for workplace safety violations through realistic fees, not protect unsafe companies from these higher fees by denying disabled workers’ claims.
If you think the WSIB’s ads are scary, check out the Canadian Injured Workers Society at http://www.ciws.ca for a real eye-opener!
Not to sound insensitive, but I don’t think the worker in the “Welder” ad survived his “accident”.
This so called work safe BC has only one function to protect the employer from being sued by the injured workers.This was supposed to be no fault insurance but the only one they blame is the employee. http://civilrighrsforinjuredworkers.blogspot.com/